I'll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours
Sat May 10, 2008 at 03:34:37 AM PDT
Your mother, that is. Or the person or people who mothered you, if that's the path your life has taken.
My mother doesn't do Mother's Day, so I have no interesting Mother's Day stories to tell. But as I'll detail in the body of this diary, this is, after a fashion, very much a tribute to my mother. And I invite you to respond to it with a tribute to your mother figure(s) in whatever fashion you see fit.
See, Mama tells stories. Lots. Often. Sometimes the same one to the same person in the span of five minutes. Some months ago, I suggested she write her stories in a book so we'd be able to refer to them by number when she started telling one in public. She thought this was a particularly amusingly rude suggestion, but I was serious. (Still no takers.)
I suggested she call it, "Stories My Kids Are Tired of Hearing." That would be volume 1. "Baby Stories My Kids Are Tired of Hearing" would be volume 2. Then I suggested volume 3, "Stories My Kids Are Tired of Hearing Me Tell Wrong" -- because, though my mother has a background in journalism and an even more exhausting background in keeping track of her four living kids (don't worry about it), she sometimes loses a fact and replaces it with one from another story. Frequently, when we're in public (which hasn't happened since the wife and I moved from Virginia to Texas), she'll start telling one of her stories, and I'll wait for when she gets something wrong, at which point I will jump in and say something like, "Mama, one of these days you'll get that story right, but this is not that day."
Integral to this is that I treat her like someone who is very old, means well and can't remember where she put her glasses when they're on her face. I do this with gestures. Occasionally I even get all the way through it without--
She will then swat me. (You only think I'm making this up. Would I lie to you?)
I will respond, "You can assault me all day, vile woman, but you cannot make me wrong!"
Oh, did I forget to mention that she only starts telling stories about us with people she trusts. These are people who will laugh at that exchange, not, for example, vegetarians who will politely remember they left roast cooking.
I have inherited my mother's proclivity for telling stories, which I am confident shocks every Kossack, even the ones not reading this, to levels previously unreached. (And you thought BUSH was bad. HAH!) Fortunately, the details of my stories are generally verifiable on the Internet, so if I am worried that I have gotten my Mendeleev and my Mengele mixed up, I simply consult a few sources and proceed like I never had a doubt in the world.
In my intro, I invited Kossacks to share stories of the people who, well, raised them. Since my mother had a desk job for much of my childhood, my father spent a lot of time raising us. (My mother gets really pissed off when, responding to "What does your husband do for a living?" she said "He stays at home raising our four children," and was met with ::laughs:: "Yes, but what does he DO?")
I inherited my father's sensitivity. You've seen it in some diaries. (The snark, though, is all me. I got that from the Web.)
Both of my parents taught me that how a person treats you need not determine how you treat them. Some people are nasty because they don't like you, and some people's default is just abrasive, and they don't mean to be rude. And some are just horribly confused, or alone, or they act out because they need positive reinforcement and role models. (Growing up, I knew a LOT of people from Column C.)
From my mother, I get my attention to detail, which makes me such a fucking annoying copy editor. (The traditional media employ a lot of copy editors with a lot of years of experience who make a lot of mistakes. It's painful.) From my father, I get the overall picture, which makes these diaries flow -- except this one. But this diary isn't supposed to flow, so there. Ha.
From my mother, through her father, I get a pretty much undying respect for the person willing to take a bullet for me. Doesn't matter if I think the conflict is legitimate. Soldiers don't choose where they go; they merely choose to be ordered to go.
From my parents, through their appearances, I get my lack of concern for others' appearances and concern instead for what they think, why they think it and how much they care about other people.
From my father, I learned that real men cry. (He benches over 700 pounds. Anyone who says that isn't real better be Lou fuckin' Ferrigno.) When Red Auerbach died, I was beside myself. I was beside myself for about a third of writing tomorrow's diary, which makes me tear up just thinking about it. (You think I tease, but it is so worth it, Kossacks. So worth it.)
From the lives my parents were forced to lead as children, I get the impetus to be very fiercely protective of children (which is one reason I was a year from being a licensed teacher before I switched majors). I get the confidence to see that something is not right and the confidence to say so (when I'm not afraid I'd be fired. Principles don't pay the bills yet.) I get their respect when I disagree with them and can take them on in an argument. (Took my mother years before she figured out I wasn't stridently disagreeing with her because I hated her but because I wanted her to understand me. My father is largely too tired these days for such arguments.)
From my parents' cultural upbringing, I get the uncanny ability to recognize most Top 40 songs from the '60s and '70s (and some from before). I've also acquired some of my father's "That's the guy who played the waiter in 'Bosom Buddies,' which is the only sitcom I can think of that featured two copywriters living in one apartment."
And from things I shouldn't know about child abuse and things I do know about it, I get the desire to tell stories other people haven't heard. Some of them are really painful to tell and to be told, like tomorrow's. Some of them are bitterly fun to tell because if they aren't fun, they're painful, and it's more fun to laugh at our repeat of the 1880s than to cry over it. Plus, having fun leaves one more open to discussing it, which leads to figuring out how to stop it.
So now I've told you about my parents (each of whom was mother and/or father, depending on the circumstances). Tell me about the people who raised you.
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